Daniel
C. Dennett

[1] Imagine somebody
whose enthusiasm for metaphysical musings is so matched by ineptitude
that when his bank informs him that his account is overdrawn, he
manages to convince himself that the modern banking system had
created a new kind of Cosmic Substance: anti-cash ,
convertible into minus-pounds-sterling, nego-dollars, vac-euros, and
so forth. Being a staunch 'realist' about all things, he decides that
his bankers have just informed him that they are holding, somewhere
within their walls, in a container with his name on it, a particular
quantity of anti-cash. It's like matter and anti-matter, he thinks,
and he supposes that the annihilation that happens when his overdraft
of -£200.43 meets his deposit of £300.46 is
shazam! the explosive generation of £100.03 of
ordinary cash (minus a small quantity extracted by the bank) plus,
perhaps, a few stray photons or quarks or gravity waves. He wonders:
What kind of containers does the bank use to hold the anti-cash till
the regular cash arrives? How are they insulated? Can you store cash
and anti-cash in the same box and somehow prevent them from getting
in contact? Might there be zombanks that only seemed to store
cash and anti-cash? How could we tell? This is a hard problem indeed!

[2] What this poor
chap needs is a good dose of Gilbert Ryle's 'logical behaviorism,'
which is the plain truth about bank balances, however controversial
it might be as a theory of the mind. Your bank statement does not
report a set of facts about containers and viaducts and machines
within its walls; rather it is an expressionone among many
possible expressionsof what Ryle would call a multi-track
behavioral disposition: roughly, the bank is disposed to honor your
monetary commitments up to a certain amount, disposed to charge you
for the current condition of your account at the following rate,
disposed to expel currency from its automatic machines at your
command in such-and-such denominations, and so forth, an indefinitely
large system of interlocked if-thens. The bank needs to keep track of
all these dispositions, and how it manages to do this is a 'wires and
pulleys' question of interest to certain sorts of technicians in the
banking world, but your bank statementand indeed all your
communicative interactions with the bankare not about
these details of implementation at all. You can know everything worth
knowing about bank balancesyou can be a financial geniusand
be clueless about the actual mechanisms by which banks maintain their
breathtakingly elaborate dispositional states, the states that govern
all their financialbehavior . You don't need to be a
mechanist, and you don't need to be a 'para-mechanist' (inventing
anti-cash and the para-machinery to deal with it).

[3] If only the case
of the mind were as straightforward! If it were, however, there would
have been no need for Ryle to write The Concept of Mind , one
of the most original and influentialif still hugely
underestimatedworks of philosophy of the century. The goal of
the book was to quell just such sorts of confusions about mental
events and entities, the confusions that had generated the
centuries-old pendulum swing between Descartes's dualism
('para-mechanical' hypotheses) and Hobbes's materialism (mechanical
hypotheses), both sides correctly discerning the main flaws in the
other, but doomed to reproducing them in mirror image. Since minds
are so much more complex and confusing than banking systems, and
since the tempting confusions about minds have centuries of tradition
giving them spurious authority, Ryle's task of re-educating our
imaginations had to be correspondingly subtle and difficult, so much
so that my parallel with banking, if taken dead literally, would be
just the sort of caricature that so often leads to premature
dismissal of an iconoclastic voice. The multi-track dispositions of a
bank vis-a-vis a depositor can beindeed legally must bespelled
out definitively, without significant ambiguity or loss, but Ryle
knew better than to accede to requests that he define the disposition
of vanity, or wittiness, or any other mental treasure in terms of
'input and output' or behavioral responses to stimulation. That was
not the sort of contribution he was setting out to make. He had
something more modestcertainly more realisticin mind, not
a formal or scientific theory of the mind, but still something in its
own way highly ambitious: he hoped to break some of the most
deep-seated habits of thought we have about our own mental lives.

[4] But isn't it
just obvious that minds are not at all like banking systems?
Isn't it obvious that we know our own minds 'from the inside' in a
way that nothing knows or needs to know banking, which is all outside
and no inside? Perhaps it is just obviousuntil you read
The Concept of Mind . You may then discover that even if he
fails to convince you, you can at least harbour the hunch that maybe,
just maybe, the giant step we need to take to solve the mysteries of
the mind is some version of Ryle's sideways step off the pendulum.
But it certainly is a radical step.

[5] How did Ryle
hope to dispel the confusions he saw in the tradition? 'The
Concept of Mind ,' he tells us, 'was a philosophical book written
with a meta-philosophical purpose.'

I wanted to apply,
and be seen to be applying to some large-scale philosophical crux the
answer to the question that had preoccupied us in the 1920s, and
especially in the 1930s, the question namely 'What constitutes a
philosophical problem; and what is the way to solve it?' . . . by the
late 1940s it was time, I thought, to exhibit a sustained piece of
analytical hatchet-work being directed upon some notorious and
large-sized Gordian Knot. . . . . For a time I thought of the problem
of the Freedom of the Will as the most suitable Gordian Knot; but in
the end I opted for the Concept of Mindthough the book's actual
title did not occur to me until the printers were hankering to begin
printing the first proofs. (1970, p12)

[6] Ryle set out to
demonstrate the absurdity of what he calls 'the Official Doctrine'
and warns at the outset: 'I shall often speak of it, with deliberate
abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.'' Who are
these benighted champions of the Official Doctrine? Are therewere
thereactual 'Cartesians' (or 'Hobbists') whose susceptibility
to 'category mistakes' blinds them to the truth? Is this an
affliction only of philosophers or do scientists or others also
commit these errors of thought? One of the idiosyncrasies of the book
is that there are no footnotes and no references. No thinker living
in 1949 is mentioned or quoted anywhere in its pages, in spite of the
factperhaps because of the fact?that those rollicking
pages often purport to be demolitions of contemporary confusions. The
only person from the twentieth century who is mentioned even in
passing is Freud, and Ryle has nothing controversial to say about
Freudian ideas.

[7] Was he tilting
at windmills, then? No, I think not; I think Ryle knew just what he
was doing when he left his targets anonymous and timeless, for he was
going after mistakes that lie just beneath the surface of reflective
thought, errors that, when pointed out, everybody can scoff at but
few can avoid being poisoned by. His quest was quixotic not in
the usual sense, but in Jorge Luis Borges's sense. In his famous
fiction, 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, ' (1962)
Borges tells the tale of a literary theorist who set out to compose
(not copy, not write from memory) Cervantes' great work anew in the
twentieth century. He succeeds, and Borges tells us 'Cervantes' text
and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost
infinitely richer.' (p42) How could this be? It could be because of
the context in which the two texts were writtenand then, of
course, read. We don't need the fantastical exercise of the fictional
Menard to give us a real example of this phenomenon. At the end of
the twentieth century, The Concept of Mind is a much richer
text than it was when Ryle wrote it in mid-century. It certainly has
much more in it now for me than when I first read it as an
undergraduate in 1960. In fact I have recently been struck by a
pattern: many of the themes that are emerging as hot new directions
in up-to-the-minute cognitive science bear a striking resemblance to
long-disregarded Rylean themes: embodied and 'situated' cognition;
your mind is not in your brain; skill is not represented;
intelligence without representation--to name only the most obvious.
Ryle himself certainly did not understand his ideas in the way we are
tempted to understand these returning versions of them. Today's
problemsthe theoretical problems to which his ideas might be
part of the solutionwere largely unimagined by Ryle. How did he
arrive at his ideas, then? I think the answer lies in his method,
which more than most methods welds its strengths and weaknesses into
an indivisible lump, take it or leave it.

[8] Ryle's method is
exasperatingly informal, not just a-systematic but positively
anti-systematic, the brilliant piling on of analogies and examples
and rhetorical flourishes, cunningly designed to cajole the reader
out of those bad habits of thought, a sort of philosophical guerrilla
warfare that never settles into or commits to a positive 'theory' for
long enough to permit a well-aimed attack. The reason his method is
so informal gradually becomes clear: when people set out to do
serious theorizing about the mind, the first thing they do is to
ransack 'common sense' for a few hints about which direction to
march; if they then set off on the wrong foot, they soon create
problems for themselves that no amount of theory-repair or
refutation-of-the-opposition will solve. The mistakes are earlier,
pre-theoretical presumptions that are unlikely to come up for
re-examination in the course of formal theory-development and
criticism. Ryle suspects that some of the standard goods delivered by
'common sense' don't deserve their high standing, but to show this he
must fight fire with fire: he must charm us into pausing and
reflecting, so that we may pit better common sense against worse
before running off to theory-land. But is Ryle right ? Are all
these traditional ways of thinking mistakes? Fifty years later, we
can see that many of them are still tenaciously defended by deeply
thoughtful and adept theorists, but this hardly shows he was wrong.
A. J. Ayer, writing in 1970, candidly assessed the state of play at
that time:

In short, what Ryle
has succeeded in doing is to reduce the empire of the mind over a
considerable area. This is an important achievement, and one that is
brilliantly effected, but it does not fulfill Ryle's professed
intention of entirely exorcizing the ghost in the machine. The
movements of the ghost have been curtailed but it still walks, and
some of us are still haunted by it. (1970, p73)

The tide is still
changing, as I just noted, and the defenders of the ghost and its kin
today are ever more on the defensive (though their sallies, from
their ever more precarious toehold in common intuition, have become
desperately extravagant). I am inclined to think that Ryle just
underestimated the strength of the philosophical therapy required to
accomplish his aim.

[9] That is not the
only thing he underestimated. Ryle was no scientist, and he sometimes
betrays an almost comical optimism about the compatibility of what
Wilfrid Sellars called the scientific imagethe world of
sub-atomic particles and forcesand the manifest imageour
everyday world of people and their activities, houses and trees and
other 'middle-sized dry goods,' as Ryle's colleague, John Austin,
once put it. It seems to have been a point of unexamined faith for
Ryle that whatever the scientists might learn about mechanisms of the
brain, however necessary these were in grounding our behavioral
dispositions, they would shed scant light on the questions that
interested him. This might have been true, had brains not been so
much more complicated than banks. Ryle's questions are about what
people do , questions at what I call the personal level of
explanation (Dennett, 1969), not about how brains make it possible
for people to do what they do; those sub-personal level questions
were completely outside his purview. Cognitive scientists have often
promulgated similar differences in level or perspective, such as
David Marr's famous (1982) trio of computational, algorithmic and
physical levels, or the 'ecological' perspective advocated by
J.J.Gibson (1975), and it has been widely recognized that many of the
false starts in cognitive science have been due to failures to find
the proper level of analysis for the topic. The bold claim might be
defended that all the really tough problems in cognitive science
reside in the murky and embattled zones where the relations between
these levels must be clarified, and on these issues Ryle is
imperturbably silent, content to protect the personal level from
misguided incursions of mechanical hypotheses and para-mechanical
hypotheses (an inspired coinage of Ryle's that hastened the
extinction of its referent, though a few endangered species of
dualism still cling to dubious life). Whether Ryle's silence was due
to complacency or just prudence, it leaves some genuine philosophical
puzzles unaddressed. The strains of Ryle's wishful thinking show
through at times in the book. Many of Ryle's dismissive analogies
are, in a word, glib, shots in the dark that cannot persuade us
today. But even when Ryle is wrong, he's usually right about
something , or as Austin astutely noted in a masterful review
in 1950: 'Not only is the book stimulating, enjoyable and original,
but a quite unusually high percentage of it is true, the remainder at
least false.' But which portions are which? The informality of Ryle's
presentation leaves that up in the air.

[10] The Concept
of Mind is one of those books that is often cited by people who
haven't read it but read about it, and think they know what it
is in it. They have read that it epitomizes two woefully regressive
schools of thought that flourished unaccountably in mid-century but
are now utterly discredited: Ordinary Language Philosophy and
Behaviorism. Yes, and imbibing alcohol will lead you inexorably to
the madhouse and masturbation will make you go blind. Don't believe
it. The dismal excesses of both these schools of thought (like the
dismal excesses of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll) are terrible to
contemplate, but a few works of genius defy the labels and
brilliantly sidestep all the standard 'refutations.' This is one, but
even those who have read it often come away with curious
misconceptions. Non-philosophers, in particular, not being acquainted
with the folkways of academic philosophy, often generously assume
that philosophers must occasionally achieve results the way
workers in other disciplines do. Having read so often about Ryle's
famous doctrine of 'category mistakes,' they jump to the conclusion
that Ryle must have exposed, definitively identified, and proved the
fallaciousness of, something called a category mistake. If only. Ryle
is a tireless alluder to the 'logical geography' of various concepts,
and the errors that accrue to those who lose their way in this
terrain (or is it a multi-dimensional space?), and this must spawn
fantasies in many readers about some technical volumes somewhere in
which one can learn this logical geography, laid out like the
Periodic Table, something every philosophy graduate student is
drilled in. But that is not how philosophy at its best proceeds. Ryle
tells us in a brief (and glorious) 'Autobiographical' (1970) that
when he was at school, one of his masters said: ''Ryle, you are very
good on theories, but you are very bad on facts.'' Ryle went on: 'My
attempts to repair this latter weakness were short-lived and
unsuccessful.' During his undergraduate days at Oxford, he says, he
'took greedily to the subject of Logic. It felt to me like a grown-up
subject, in which there were still unsolved problems.' But logic 'was
in the doldrums' in Oxford at that time. Russell and Whitehead were
'still only subjects of Oxonian pleasantries' twenty-five years after
the publication of their monumental Principia Mathematica .
Nevertheless, 'It was Russell and not Moore whom I studied, and it
was Russell the logician and not Russell the epistemologist.'

[11] So is Ryle,
then, like Wittgenstein or Quine, a serious contributor to
mathematical logic or logical theory? Not at all. 'Having no
mathematical ability, equipment or interest, I did not make myself
even competent in the algebra of logic; nor did the problem of the
foundations of mathematics become a question that burned in my
belly.' (1970, p7) Ryle's interests were indeed the interests of a
logician, of somebody deeply curious about the abstract relationships
between premise and conclusion, arguments and concepts and
propositions and inferences, but his vision of 'Logic' was
old-fashioned, and not clearly the worse for it. He thought,
correctly, that all too often the shiny new tools of logical
formalisms tempt their adepts into substitutingformal
derivation for . . . thinking. There are times when the bracing task
of translating one's ideas into a canonical idiom for which proof
procedures are defined is a path to philosophical discovery, but even
there, almost all of the heavy lifting is done in coming up with the
translation. The formal proofs in philosophy that have ever made a
significant contribution are vanishingly few. Ryle actually knew a
good deal about logic, but when he holds forth in The Concept of
Mind about the logic of concepts, he is shooting from the hip
most of the time, and trusting his good, peculiar brand of common
sense. So would you, if you had such a fine faculty. His distinction
between knowing how and knowing that , the topic of
chapter two, has stood the test of time (and been reinvented by
others) across a host of disciplines, and his informal observations
on the logic of dispositional statements, the 'systematic elusiveness
of 'I'', and other idiosyncracies of ordinary language have grounded
or reformed more than a few philosophical projects.

[12] Ryle was no
logician, and no scientist, but he was also no ivory tower humanist,
in spite of his purely classical education in Greek and Latin (with
self-taught Italian, German and French). Aside from his work in
intelligence during World War II, his entire adult life was spent at
Oxford, but within that insular world, he was, as his lifelong friend
Geoffrey Warnock (1979) has said, 'an outstandingly friendly,
sociable, and (a word that particularly fits him) clubbable man.' (p
xiv ). Ryle himself thought this was what protected him from the
ego-fevers that afflict so many philosophers. Comparing
Anglo-American philosophers to their counterparts on the Continent,
he once opined:

I guess that our
thinkers have been immunized against the idea of philosophy as the
Mistress Science by the fact that their daily lives in Cambridge and
Oxford Colleges have kept them in personal contact with real
scientists. Claims to Fuehrership vanish when postprandial joking
begins. Husserl wrote as if he had never met a scientist--or a joke.
(1962, p181)

[13] Few Anglophone
philosophers, by the way, have matched Ryle's deep knowledge of
Husserl and the Phenomenologists. 'I even offered an unwanted course
of lectures, entitled Logical Objectivism: Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl
and Meinong.' These characters were soon known in Oxford as 'Ryle's
three Austrian railway stations and one Chinese game of chance.''
(1970, p8). Most of Husserl's topics can be found in The Concept
of Mind by anybody who knows what they are, but in these pages
you will find no talk of intentionality , no noemata
and no talk of qualia either, I am happy to report. His
distrust of philosophical jargon approached a shibboleth, and his
love and mastery of his own 'South Country English' idiom served him
well, providing a palette for one of the most recognizable styles in
English letters.

[14] P.G. Wodehouse
was one of Ryle's favourite authors (along with Jane Austen, whose
novels he read and reread) and like Wodehouse's world of Bertie
Wooster and Jeeves off on their sun-kissed round of country house
weekends, Ryle's particular Oxbridge is an intensified English world
too good to be true, one would think, but strange to say, it is a
portion of the real world that Ryle actually inhabited: a hearty
world of gardening and cricket and tea and bridge parties, rowing and
swimming and imagining Helvellyn in one's mind's eye, humming
Lillibullero, and, of course, dealing with students in tutorials and
dons at high table.

[15] Ryle was under
no illusions about the shortcomings of this book. His own
characterization of its aim left little or no room for half-measures,
and invited incredulity by its sheer sweep.

On the view for
which I am arguing consciousness and introspection cannot be what
they are officially described as being, since their supposed objects
are myths; but champions of the dogma of the ghost in the machine
tend to argue that the imputed objects of consciousness and
introspection cannot be myths, since we are conscious of them and can
introspectively observe them. . . . . I try to show that the official
theories of consciousness and introspection are logical muddles.
(p155)

As Austin had noted
in his laudatory reviewand Ryle never disagreedthere were
clear overshootings in his campaign:

Undoubtedly he does
persuade himself that what he has to show is that 'occult' episodes
'in the mind,' which are 'private' to one person, simply do not occur
at allnot merely that they are never mysterious causes,
themselves mysteriously caused, of our physical movements, nor merely
that their numbers and varieties have been exaggerated. (p47).

[16] Given Ryle's
insistence in The Concept of Mind that thinking was not in any
important sense a private phenomenon, a question that quite properly
dogged him for the rest of his life was vividly put in terms of
Rodin's famous sculpture of the huddled, frowning thinker: what is le
Penseur doing? He is not, to appearances, behaving, or if he is,
his behaviour is consistent with too many different accounts of his
ongoing thinking (his 'inner story,' we are tempted to say, but Ryle
fights hard to keep us from saying it). It is obvious enough that the
Thinker is probably talking to himself, at least part of the
time, and Ryle happily allows that we are all capable of such 'silent
soliloquy.' But are we to adopt talking to ourselves as the model for
all thinkingis all thought conducted one way or another in a
'language of thought'? Ryle sees that even if some thought is in
language, not all thought is in languageand sometimes talking
to yourself is not even an instance of thinking, but rather a
substitute for thinking. (The confusion between talking to yourself
and thinking is often encountered in philosophical books, especially
those that maintain that thinking is a sort of talking to yourself!)
So what is the Thinker doing, and what is different
about what he's doing when he's doing it well? Ryle wrote a series of
papers, none entirely satisfactory by his own lights, attempting to
answer this question (some of them collected posthumously in Ryle, On
Thinking , 1979). As he comments in his Collected Papers :

. . . like plenty of
other people, I deplored the perfunctoriness with which The
Concept of Mind had dealt with the Mind qua pensive. But I
have latterly been concentrating heavily on this particular theme for
the simple reason that it has turned out to be at once a still
intractable and a progressively ramifying maze. Only a short
confrontation with the theme suffices to make it clear that and why
no account of Thinking of a Behaviorist coloration will do, and also
why no account of a Cartesian coloration will do either.' (pviii of
Vol II, 1971)

[17] Where does that
leave us? With a book of breathtaking ambition in one dimension and
refreshing modesty in another, a book whose hints and asides have
sometimes proven more influential than its major declarations, a book
that may in another fifty years prove to have an even higher
proportion of truth than we find in it today. In any event, it has
already fulfilled Ryle's 'meta-philosophical purpose' of showing us a
good way of doing philosophy. And just as one would expect, one
cannot learn this good way by memorizing a few rules or doctrines,
but only by immersing oneself in the practice and letting the method
do its work. When I was writing my dissertation under Ryle's
supervision, I didn't appreciate this subtle fact, and told myself
(and my fellow graduate students, I am sad to say) that I had
actually learned almost nothing from the great man; he was a
wonderful booster of my often flagging spirits, a charming
example-spinner and conversationalist, but almost useless as an
argument-critic, doctrine-refiner, debater. We never argued ;
he never attempt to refute my propositions. But then, on the
eve of my viva-voce examination in the spring of 1965, I compared the
submitted draft of my dissertation with a version I had written
roughly a year earlier, and was amazed to discover Ryle's voice,
perspective, method, and vision on almost every page of the later
version. You, too, may read The Concept of Mind , and walk
away thinking you haven't learned very much. Don't be so sure. In due
course you may discover that you have become a Rylean like me.

[18] In one of his
hilarious novels, Peter de Vries has a character say 'Oh,
superficially he's deep, but deep down, he's shallow!' How could it
be otherwise, come to think of it? Philosophy is above all supposed
to be profound, though, and a student asked me the other day if, in
the end, I thought Ryle's book was deep. No, I decided; it is
shallowwonderfully, importantly shallow. There are those who
love to tread water, the deeper the better, and who think that
philosophy without depth is guaranteed to be . . . superficial! Ryle
unhesitatingly defied this fashion and taught us how some of the
deepest waters in philosophy could be made to evaporate. Those who
still find themselves over their heads on the topic of 'consciousness
and introspection' would do well to follow Ryle onto the shore of
common sense, where the remaining problems are much more interesting
than treading water.[1]

References

Austin, J. L.,
'Intelligent Behaviour: A Critical Review of The Concept of Mind
' in Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 1950.Reprinted
in Wood and Pitcher.

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